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Holtz - There's hope against greater housing excess

Column from regular Gazette columnist Jim Holtz from April 14, 2014.

Canadian architect Moshe Safdie was interviewed on the CBS news program Sunday Morning last week. Most of the discussion centered on the Habitat housing development that he designed in 1967 for the World’s Fair in Montreal, but it went further describing the trend toward smaller more sustainable housing that is beginning to emerge. There does appear to be at least the beginning of a small shift away from the notion that the ultimate goal in life is to have as large a house as one can afford. In the Fifties, for most people that meant a 1,200 square foot house on a quarter acre lot in the suburbs. Fifty years later and the 1,200 square foot vision of success had grown to about 3,500 square feet, and the lot had shrunk to a piece of land just large enough to contain the house’s footprint. A short drive to Kelowna or the outlying areas of Vancouver reveals the continued popularity of that thinking. But doubt is beginning to creep into the minds of many about the wisdom of those aspirations. The cost of maintaining large homes and concerns over the environmental impact that they represent have helped launch a small movement away from the excesses of traditional home design and construction.There have been proponents of alternate housing concepts for years, of course, and in Grand Forks the model of sustainable, cooperative living established by the Doukhobors is a great example of one alternative. Other individuals here and in the Kootenays have built cob, hay bale, and stacked log homes of small to moderate size as a way of avoiding the environmental impact of contemporary building materials and techniques. So far, however, the number of homes built using alternate methods is extremely small.Still, there are signs that progress is being made toward more sustainable models of living. In the U.S. the Tiny House movement is an example. Many interesting and very affordable homes have been designed and built by individuals all over the country and in Canada and overseas as well. Some are fantastic, some fanciful, some practical and some bizarre, but they all represent a different way of looking at how we live in and interact with our environment. The weblog inhabitat.com is another example. The website states that it is “devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.” It demonstrates that there are in fact large numbers of people interested in innovative design and provides some hope that we may one day not regard greater and greater housing excess as our ultimate goal and ambition.